In the Bathroom with Wietse Venema

Last updated: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 11:01:00 GMT

Post-conference toilet fun.

A short while ago I found myself face to face -- and incidentally quite the worse for wear -- with Wietse Venema, author of Postfix, SATAN and TCP Wrapper, amongst other things. In a restaurant bathroom. We were in a restaurant bathroom.

Being drunk and effusive -- which is so much less troublesome than being drunk and abusive -- I found myself running off at the mouth. I congratulated him on the excellent presentation he'd given earlier, and assured him that I'd found it very interesting. I had, but still it seemed like a clumsy attempt to ingratiate myself.

I recall asking him if he thought that there was a place for something as simple as TCP Wrapper, yet as useful, that would become so widespread, and in what area he thought that tool might be applied. I'm interested to know what it feels like to have peaked. Not that I think the that venerable Wietse had peaked with TCP Wrapper, but I thought that a man of his acumen, with successes like these under his belt, might have something interesting to say on the subject. Looking back, it was a stupid question to ask. But, finding himself cornered in a toilet by a drunken skinhead, he answered with good humour.

I'm buggered if I can remember what he said, exactly.

I think he said something about being presented with the necessity, and the opportunity, and that perhaps anyone could have written the same tool. He may even have suggested that such a tool might yet be written by me. I remember laughing too loudly, but genuinely, and telling him that I doubted that very much.

Since then, I've spent some time worrying about what he thought of that encounter. I think that, at best, the shallowness of the question marks me as an implementor, not an innovator. I had certainly felt out of place at the conference. A charlatan, an impostor.

I think that Wietse Venema meets a lot of people, and that he probably didn't waste much time thinking about the encounter at all. And if he does think about it, he might even compare it to some of the questions that were asked directly after his presentation, by people who, one can only assume, were not on the outside of several gin and tonics, a bottle of house white and a few doses of Night Nurse. Earlier, it had been plain that he was disappointed by the calibre of the questions asked. But then, I'd had a long time to think of a question. Was that the best I could come up with?

One thing's for sure: he spent less time worrying about it than I have.

Maybe I should have asked why the hell PARANOID is both a compile-time and a run-time option. Yeah, it's an implementation detail, but it's one that pisses me off every time I have to recompile libwrap and tcpd, despite the fact that whatever OS I'm playing with shipped with it. It's even worse than that; depending on how smart the author of my operating system's package manager is, I might have to break the managed package, overwrite it or uninstall it, to get the bloody thing to run unPARANOID. And breaking automatic package management is surely a retrograde step, in security terms? Every time I have to do something like that myself I'm losing the facility to keep myself abreast of updates.

Yeah, I should have asked him that. And the next time I find him in a restaurant toilet, I will.